I thank Congresswoman Sewell for her leadership and for yielding this time, and I thank my good friend Spencer Bachus for his leadership as well, and I congratulate him and his family for the courage they showed at a time of great stress…

I am pleased to yield to my friend from Virginia, the majority leader, for the purposes of inquiring about the schedule for the week to come.

I thank the gentleman for his observation. If I can, there is some irony in the gentleman's response. We've been talking about two items: one, the going to conference on the budget, which does, in fact, deal with prospective spending, a…

I thank the gentleman for his comments. I want to say I have a lot of respect, as the gentleman knows and I have expressed on this floor, for Mr. Ryan. I think Mr. Ryan is a very able and dedicated and conscientious Member of this House. I…

I thank the majority leader for the information on the business for next week. I would observe that he and I cochaired, the honorary cochairs, with John Lewis, of course, the chair, our leader, along with Terri Sewell, Spencer Bachus, and…

Preliminary, however, to my remarks, I want to say I thank the previous speaker for his remarks, and I would hope that with the Senate's having passed a budget, our having passed a budget, and the President submitting a budget that we will…

We express our sympathies to all of them, and we recognize that they have some employees in Boston and around this country at the municipal and State level, and, yes, at the Federal level, who are going to try to respond and make sure…

I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Speaker, I adopt the remarks that were made by Ms. Norton. The delinquency rate of Federal employees is far below what it is for other employees on a general level throughout this country. I adopt…

I thank the gentleman. The way to do that plan of how to amortize our debt and invest in the priorities of this country--education, innovation, infrastructure, other basic biomedical research to which the gentleman referred--is to have a…

I certainly agree that defaulting on the debt is an extraordinarily irresponsible thing to do, and, in fact, we shouldn't do it. In fact, we shouldn't use it as a leverage point, in my view, to pretend that somehow going over the debt…

I would simply observe--and he knows this as well as I do--that there will be an agreement on things that he perhaps does not agree with and there will be things in the agreement that perhaps I will not agree with. The secret, in my view…

I thank the gentleman for that. Following on his observation, clearly what he says is we need to focus on priorities. I think he's absolutely right on that. I think one of the sad things is we have passed a fiscal posture in this country…